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PSOFT ships Pencil+ 4

Japanese developer P Softhouse – more commonly known as PSOFT – has released Pencil+ 4, the latest version of its non-photorealistic rendering plugin for 3ds Max.

The update adds support for material transparency, a new Light Intensity Control and new edge detection settings, and makes the plugin compatible with 3ds Max’s Nitrous viewport.

A cel-shading tool used in production on major Japanese animations
Used in Japanese animated features like the Rebuild of Evangelion series and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, Pencil+ has also been used in production by Western studios, notably by Rooster Teeth on RWBY.

The plugin generates 3D renders that reproduce the look of pen-and-ink and coloured pencil drawings, with a range of cel-shading and edge outlining options, shadow blending, and stroke maps for hatching effects.

New in Pencil+ 4: new material and lighting options
To that, Pencil+ 4 adds support for material transparency, as shown in the (Japanese-language) video above. Transparency can follow a gradient, enabling it to generate effects suitable for hair, for example.

There is also a new Light Intensity Control, which can be used to adjust the area of a surface illuminated by a light interactively, along with the illumination intensity.

In addition, the update adds a new Nitrous Shader, which enables scenes to be cel-shaded directly in 3ds Max’s Nitrous viewport and edited in real time.

Extended line rendering controls
When it comes to line rendering, there are a couple of new options for edge detection, including the option to outline open edges in geometry.

A new Merge Groups option enables users to generate only a single outline for a set of 3D objects; while self-intersection is handled automatically, as shown in the video above.

Support for multithreading and XRefs, new scene converter and Spreadsheet view
Under the hood, Pencil+ 4 also now supports multithreading, which results in a render speed boost of around 15x in the demo scene shown in the video above.

The plugin also now supports 3ds Max’s XRefs for referencing objects from external files within a scene.

There are also new utilities for converting a standard 3ds Max scene to Pencil+ materials and a Spreadsheet view for editing the material and edge properties of large numbers of objects within a scene.

Pricing and availability
Pencil+ 4 is available for 3ds Max 2015 and above. It costs 60,480 Yen (around $540).